Emerald City by Jennifer Egan Read Free Book Online Page B

darkroom. He was always the last to leave; his boss, Vesuvi, would hand him the camera as soon as the last shot was done and then swan out through the sea of film containers, plastic cups, and discarded sheets of backdrop paper. Vesuvi was one of those people who always had somewhere to go. He was blessed with a marvelous paunch, which Rory tried not to admire too openly. He didn’t want Vesuvi to get the wrong idea.
    Rory swept the debris into bags, then he turned out the lights, locked up the studio, and headed down to the street. Twilight was his favorite hour—metal gates sliding down over storefronts, newspapers whirling from the sidewalk into the sky, an air of promise and abandonment. This was the way he’d expected New York to look, and he was thrilled when the city complied.
    He took the subway uptown to visit Stacey, a failing model whom he adored against all reason. Stacey—when girls with names like Zane and Anouschka and Brid regularly slipped him their phone numbers during shoots. Stacey refused to change her name. “If I make it,” she said, “they’ll be happy to call me whatever.” She never acknowledged that she was failing, though it was obvious. Rory longed to bring it up, to talk it over with her, but he was afraid to.
    Stacey lay on her bed, shoes still on. A Diet Coke was on thetable beside her. She weighed herself each morning, and when she was under 120, she allowed herself a real Coke that day.
    “What happened at
Bazaar?”
Rory asked, perching on the edge of the bed. Stacey sat up and smoothed her hair.
    “The usual,” she said. “I’m too commercial.” She shrugged, but Rory could see she was troubled.
    “And that was nothing,” Stacey continued. “On my next go-see the guy kept looking at me and flipping back and forth through my book, and of course I’m thinking, Fantastic, he’s going to hire me. So you know what he finally says? I’m not ugly enough. He says, ‘Beauty today is ugly beauty. Look at those girls, they’re monsters—gorgeous, mythical monsters. If a girl isn’t ugly, I won’t use her.’”
    She turned to Rory. He saw tears in her eyes and felt helpless. “What a bastard,” he said.
    To his surprise, she began to laugh. She lay back on the bed and let the laughter shake her. “I mean, here I am,” she said, “killing myself to stay thin, hot-oiling my hair, getting my nails done, and what does he tell me? I’m not ugly enough!”
    “It’s crazy,” Rory said, watching Stacey uneasily. “He’s out of his mind.”
    She sat up and rubbed her eyes. She looked slaphappy, the way she looked sometimes after a second gin and tonic. Eight months before, after a year’s meticulous planning, she had bought her own ticket to New York from Cincinnati. And this was just the beginning; Stacey hoped to ride the wave of her success around the world: Paris, Tokyo, London, Bangkok. The shelves of her tiny apartment were cluttered with maps and travel books, and whenever she met a foreigner—it made no difference from where—she would carefully copy his address into a small leatherbound book, convinced it would not be long before she was everywhere. She was the sort of girl for whom nothing happened by accident, and it pained Rory to watchher struggle when all day in Vesuvi’s studio he saw girls whose lives were accident upon accident, from their discovery in whatever shopping mall or hot dog stand to the startling, gaudy error of their faces.
    “Rory,” Stacey said. “Look at me a minute.”
    He turned obediently. She was so close he could smell the warm, milky lotion she used on her face. “Do you ever wish I was uglier?” she asked.
    “God no,” Rory said, pulling away to see if she was joking. “What a question, Stace.”
    “Come on. You do this all day long.” She moved close to him again, and Rory found himself looking at the tiny pores on either side of her nose. He tried to think of the studio and the girls there, but when he concentrated on